Labor Union Blog

The current immigration system is badly broken and needs a comprehensive overhaul. The Obama administration has put immigration reform on the legislative agenda this year by calling for a new system that “controls immigration and makes it an orderly system.” The White House also says such a plan should include a path to legal status for undocumented workers.

A new report released today by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) lays out an approach to fixing the system in a way that protects the rights of all workers. Written by former Labor Secretary Ray Marshall, this approach already has been adopted by both the AFL-CIO and Change to Win.

Marshall told a Capitol Hill press conference this morning:

Current immigration laws subject foreign workers to grave risks, exploitation, and uncertain futures, while depressing wages and working conditions for all workers. This framework addresses these defects. All workers will benefit from these reforms.

The report, “Immigration for Shared Prosperity: A Framework for Comprehensive Reform,”‘ points out that the American economy has become dependent on foreign labor. Indeed, most of our workforce growth since 1990 has come from immigration. But, at the same time, according to the report:

The programs for admitting foreign workers for temporary and permanent jobs are rigid, cumbersome, and inefficient; do too little to protect the wages and working conditions of workers (foreign or domestic); do not respond very well to employers’ needs; and give almost no attention to adapting the number and characteristics of foreign workers to domestic labor shortages.

Click here to download the report.

Marshall’s approach calls for the establishment of an independent commission to monitor industry trends and labor needs for future immigration. The commission, which would be established in two stages, would improve the way labor market shortages are measured and put in place procedures to efficiently adjust foreign labor flows to employers’ needs while protecting domestic and foreign labor standards.

The approach also calls for:

• A secure and effective worker authorization mechanism. Border control alone is not likely to be sufficient, the report says. At best, 40 percent of unauthorized border crossers are stopped. But even completely successful border controls would not stop illegal immigration because an estimated 40 percent to 45 percent  of these immigrants have overstayed visas. So Marshall proposes that the government complement border controls with a much more effective visa enforcement system.
• Rational operational control of the border. Because most unauthorized immigrants enter the United States to work or join family members who are working, the report proposes creating a secure identifier issued by the federal government for immigrant workers with biometric data and a unique work authorization number for each new job based on individual PIN numbers.
• Adjustment of status for the current undocumented population. Rounding up and deporting millions of undocumented workers would violate American values of fairness and due process, but also would be impractical. Instead, providing a clear path to citizenship would raise labor standards for all workers, the report says.
• Improvement, not expansion, of temporary worker programs, limited to temporary or seasonal, not permanent, jobs. To prevent the well-documented abuse of guest workers, Marshall recommends that there be a limit on the period guest workers can work and that the use of these workers to occupations the independent commission certifies have real, temporary labor shortages and there have been good-faith efforts to recruit domestic workers.

The power of workers comes through with a union. That’s the message and lesson learned during the successful sit-in by nearly 300 workers at the Republic Windows & Doors plant in Chicago last December.

Workers at Republic made justice happen. After a six-day sit-in at the plant, the workers, members of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) Local 1110, faced down the company and one of the nation’s biggest financial institutions. The company announced it was shutting down and that the workers would not receive the severance and accrued vacation pay they were owed (see video).

Bank of America, which received billions in taxpayer bailout funds, cut off the company’s line of credit. Outraged by the move, a coalition of workers, community groups, politicians and religious leaders shamed the bank and company into backing down.

UE Organizing Director Bob Kingsley, speaking at a brown-bag discussion at the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., told the audience the Republic workers’ battle “could not have been won without the labor and community support.”

There were demonstrations in places I never heard of. We had major league international union support.

Not only did that community support play a big role in the workers’ victory at Republic, it was crucial to getting the workers back on the job after the plant closed. The Republic plant is scheduled to reopen in coming weeks under a new owner, Serious Materials. UE members will be recalled to their jobs as work ramps up at the plant, under a new UE contract negotiated with the plant’s new owners.

Serious Materials, which makes energy efficient “green” windows, was first alerted to the plant’s availability by the Sierra Club, one of the groups backing the workers’ strike, Kingsley said.

Because of the Republic workers’ struggle, all workers are better off, says AFL-CIO Organizing Director Ken Zinn.

If they had not had a union, they would have all had to go home with nothing.

Local 1110 President Armando Robles says what happened to the Republic workers can happen anywhere. That’s why we need to push Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act. The workers won because they have a union and can come together to fight for their rights, he said. Now is the time to mobilize to protect workers’ rights, he said.

The battle is not over. It is time to start acting and talking. We don’t have to wait until the boss screws us.

NTUC President Laxman Basnet (center left) and Solidarity Center Programs Director Tim Ryan rally with workers on March 18.

In Nepal, unions are still struggling to promote democracy and the rights of workers, reports the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center’s Tim Ryan from Kathmandu.

In 2006, the democratic trade unions of Nepal took to the streets to push out the country’s autocratic king and usher in a new phase of democracy in this poor, mountainous country. Since then, the former Maoist insurgents have been brought uneasily into the political process, and they succeeded in forming the current parliamentary government—but democracy and justice for workers are still a distant vision.

The threat to Nepal’s fragile democracy, plus the impact of the global economic crisis, led more than 50 trade union organizations from 30 countries around the world to Nepal earlier this month in a show of solidarity at two national conventions of the democratic trade union movement here—the Nepal Trade Union Congress-Independent (NTUC-I) and the General Federation of Nepali Trade Unions (GEFONT). For the past five years, the Solidarity Center has been working with Nepalese unions to increase membership, assist in labor law reform and, now that democratic space has opened up, encourage the unions to engage with their parliament.

The story of Kumar, however, is painful proof that the Maoists are far from cooperative. I met Kumar (not his real name) at the NTUC-I convention, held in the regional city of Birganj. More than 1,000 delegates attended from all over the country, some traveling days to get there, to discuss policy and elect leaders. An average of three candidates ran for each office and executive council position. Campaigning was high-spirited, featuring demonstrations, songs and dances, prolific leafleting and processions in an open venue dotted with colorful tents. It was followed by an impressive free and transparent voting process.

Kumar stood by, solemn and subdued, watching all the commotion, not attempting to join in. As he told me:

I just got out of the hospital after spending two weeks there. My nose is still broken and I need an operation.

Kumar is the president of a casino union in the capital city of Kathmandu and a national NTUC-I vice president. He was at work when a mob of Maoist thugs entered the casino and attacked him. His members tried to defend him. “But the Maoists beat me all over,” he said. As he shuffled away into the raucous hoopla of the campaigning, holding onto the shoulder of his 10-year-old son, he looked so damaged it seemed his bones might come apart.

So while the Maoists have joined the national political process, their trade union front continues its intimidating ways, attacking democratic unions and employers with naked violence and extortion. Despite this blatant aggression, the democratic unions—especially NTUC-I and GEFONT, aligned with the mainstream United Marxist-Leninist Party—have reached out to the Maoist union to try to bring it to the table and develop consensus on pushing progressive labor law reform.

One young NTUC-I cadre with whom I spoke was highly skeptical. Ashok, a leader of the Rickshaw Workers Union, puts it this way:

They are still bandits. They don’t care about collective bargaining or a relationship with the employers or the economic progress of the country. All they care about is strikes and violence.

At the GEFONT convention, held simultaneously in Kathmandu, a senior GEFONT officer agreed that the Maoists were continuing their violence, and they were anything but democratic.

The Maoist party tells the union who will be the leadership. They are totally controlled by the party.

Yet GEFONT leaders believe the Maoists must be engaged on some level, both in politics and in the labor movement, in order to be reined in. A top-ranked NTUC-I leader echoed this approach.

We need to get them under a joint trade union umbrella, with a code of conduct, and enmesh them in a legal system in order to move them in a responsible direction.

One of the goals is a united union approach on reforming the country’s labor laws:

If they do not support the reforms, they could wreck the process.

As President Obama travels to Mexico today, the AFL-CIO is calling for the U.S. and Mexican governments to make human and workers’ rights a key part of the agenda.

The AFL-CIO strongly believes that security and prosperity in North America must be based on respect for human rights. According to the AFL-CIO International Department:  

While we applaud the administration’s recent initiatives to support Mexican efforts to control the drug cartels, the federation is calling on the U.S. to clearly state that all security operations funded by U.S. taxpayers must respect human rights. Such a policy is particularly important in view of the many violations, nearly all unpunished, that have been documented by respected Mexican and international human rights groups. 

Two high-profile cases illustrate Mexico’s failure to protect workers’ rights. Napoleon Gómez Urrutia, leader of the Mexican mine workers union. Gómez, was forcefully removed from his position in 2006. Gómez spoke out against the Mexican government and the Grupo Mexico mining company in response to a tragic mine accident in Pasta de Conchos that left 65 miners dead, many of them members of unions.

Just yesterday, a panel of the Mexico City Federal District Court invalidated arrest warrants and Mexican government extradition requests for Gómez, who is living in exile with his family in Canada after receiving death threats. The same day, though, another court issued an arrest warrant for him.  

At the same time, the Mexican government’s inaction in the case of Santiago Rafael Cruz, an organizer for the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) who was murdered in Monterrey in April 2007, also must be addressed. The government has made no serious effort over the past two years to arrest or prosecute the persons responsible for his murder.

Finally, we’re calling on the administration to fulfill President Obama’s pledge to fully enforce the labor rights provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) by subjecting them to the same penalties as commercial disputes. The AFL-CIO also is urging the Mexican government to end practices that limit workers’ freedom to freely choose their representatives, such as employer-controlled “protection contracts,” government restrictions on union registration and firings of workers who advocate union democracy.

Our International Department states that “real security in Mexico and in the region depends not only on reactivating the economy,”

but also on ensuring the benefits of investment and trade flow to the workers, in Mexico as well as the U.S., who build and grow that economy every day.

In two terrific recent articles, United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard and labor journalist David Bacon make the case that the Employee Free Choice Act is legislation that will help our economy work for everyone again.

On the Campaign for America’s Future blog, Gerard takes a hard look at the pattern of corporate hostility to both government oversight and workers’ freedom to form unions and how that fraudulent argument has undermined our economy. Gerard says we need a return to “common endeavor” so working families can counterbalance the overwhelming power of corporations and bargain for a fair stake in the economy. And that means passing the Employee Free Choice Act:

Simply put, employers wield considerable strength, and workers must be able to unionize so wage and benefit negotiations occur on a more even playing field. There’s power in common endeavor.

In 1935, in the depth of the Great Depression, the government encouraged workers to use their power to obtain better wages. It did that because better wages to many would help end the depression for all.

Just like in 1935, workers now need unions to help them secure better wages, which will, in the end, be good for the country because it will improve the economy.

For that to happen, though, the Employee Free Choice Act must pass. Workers must have the right, once again, to choose how they want to form their own organizations.

Writing at Truthout.org, Bacon says the original National Labor Relations Act, passed during the Depression, was aimed at encouraging workers to form unions and bargain and protecting their right to do so. That freedom has come under attack, Bacon says, from corporate leaders who want to keep their overwhelming control over the workplace and the economy. Under the guise of protecting workers’ rights, Bacon says, Big Business is trying to prevent workers from having a say in the workplace. Says Bacon:

We need a reality check about what actually happens when workers try to organize. The Employee Free Choice Act is a practical and necessary way to reestablish workers’ rights in practice, not just on paper.

Bacon details the vicious anti-union campaigns of coercion, delay and even illegal firing that are all too common in today’s workplaces and discusses how the provisions of the Employee Free Choice Act would level the playing field and put the choice in workers’ hands, not their bosses’.

Both pieces are valuable arguments in support of the Employee Free Choice Act, examining the lessons of history and the troubles facing our economy. And the conclusion is clear: it’s time to pass the Employee Free Choice Act.

John Cronan, a member of MEBA and a former Seafarers member, spoke this morning on the “Today” show.

The AFL-CIO Maritime Trades Department (MTD) salutes the courageous efforts of the all-union crew aboard the Maersk Alabama for maintaining control of their vessel, as well as the heroic efforts of the U.S. Navy in rescuing Capt. Richard Phillips from his Somali captors.

Union members like John Cronan, third engineer and son of a merchant sailor, who summed it up this way on NBC’s “Today” show:

We didn’t have to retake the ship because we never surrendered it. We’re American seaman. We’re union members. We stuck together and did our jobs.

The eight licensed officers and engineers aboard the U.S.-flag vessel are members of either the Masters, Mates & Pilots (MM&P) or Marine Engineers’ Beneficial Association (MEBA), while the 12 unlicensed crew members are represented by the Seafarers (SIU). Cronan is a MEBA member and a former Seafarers member.

MTD President Michael Sacco, speaking on behalf of the maritime unions involved, said:

We are extremely proud of the efforts shown by the crew of the Maersk Alabama. These well-trained American merchant mariners exemplify the very best in our industry.

We also cannot say enough about the sacrifice of Captain Phillips to ensure his crew’s and his ship’s safety. Without his selfless act, we may have seen a tragic outcome.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said, “The crew and Captain Phillips personify the heroism that working Americans bring to their jobs every day.”

In saluting and honoring them, we honor the skills, commitment and bravery that make our country strong.

Sacco thanked President Obama and his administration for staying on top of the developing situation and authorizing the use of decisive action.

American merchant mariners have served as the nation’s fourth arm of defense since the American Revolution. The crew of the Maersk Alabama fully understood the rally cry of “Don’t give up the ship!”

The Maritime Trades Department is composed of 23 international unions representing working men and women at sea, in port facilities, in shipyards and other maritime-related fields.

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More proof out this week that the insurance industry’s sweet words for health care reform are dripping with hypocrisy. America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), which has been pushing a sham health care reform campaign masquerading as a grassroots initiative, now seems to be using dirty tricks and outright falsehoods in an attempt to keep some of their most profitable programs.

Jason Rosenbaum writes on Health Care For America Now! how Ken Johnson of the (New Bedford, Mass.) Eagle-Tribune noticed that AHIP was sending letters to newspapers in Massachusetts under the names of real seniors—who are unaware their names are being used—demanding that their representatives in Congress protect the  Medicare Advantage health care program.

Medicare Advantage is George W. Bush’s privatization experiment, which put millions of dollars in the hands of private insurance companies. President Obama has proposed to stop subsidizing private insurers through Medicare Advantage.

Rosenbaum quotes Johnson’s description of AHIP’s skullduggery: 

“I did not write a letter to the editor. It’s not from me,” said Gloria Gosselin, 75, of Lawrence. Gosselin’s name was on one of three strikingly similar letters touting the Medicare Advantage program that were sent to The (New Bedford) Eagle-Tribune.

A tip-off to the true origin of the letters, Johnson writes, came when The Eagle-Tribune received a call from a man who turned out to be an intern at the Boston office of the Dewey Square Group, a national political  marketing and consulting firm.

The man, who identified himself as Noah, wanted to know if Gloria Gosselin’s letter had been published. Asked what interest he had in the letter, Noah replied that he was Gosselin’s grandson. Gosselin does not have a grandson named Noah working in Boston.

 Click here to read Rosenbaum’s blog.

Unlike the health insurance industry, a large majority of Americans supports President Obama’s plan to finance national health care reform by eliminating tax breaks for the rich, according to a poll by Lake Research Partners.

The poll shows a clear majority of Americans (63 percent)  favor a health care funding proposal to raise taxes on those who earn more than $250,000 per year by decreasing their tax deductions. An even larger majority of those polled (80 percent) oppose funding health care reform by treating employer health care benefits as income.

Obama’s budget sets aside more than $630 billion over the next 10 years as a reserve fund to help finance reforms to the nation’s health care system. To help pay for it, Obama will allow the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent to expire in 2010 and will eliminate other tax breaks for those making more than $250,000 a year.

Support for this approach to funding health care reform has majority backing in every region of the country and among independent voters (52 percent) and Democrats (85 percent), according to Lake’s poll.